Minecraft Gear VR Edition – How The Players Described It

Oculus attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and held a special event, where the company has presented almost a complete version of the Minecraft game running on Samsung’s Gear VR headset. The participants were allowed to explore the game and some of them shared their impression through IT websites.

Samsung has released its Gear VR mobile virtual reality headset at the end of November 2015, being manufactured in collaboration with Oculus. Minecraft doesn’t need any introduction, as this sandbox video game was launched in 2011 by Mojang, but three years later, Microsoft has purchased it for 2.5 billion dollars. The game can be played on smartphones running on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, on computers running on Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux or and on Raspberry Pi, and on consoles such as Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Wii U. Soon, Minecraft will be played in virtual reality, and sometime later this year, it will be available for the Oculus Rift and Gear VR.

Those who were curious to play Minecraft on the Gear VR had this opportunity at the Game Developers Conference and they were impressed with the effects, saying that they were able to walk around and fight off enemies without struggling too much. While playing the game, the participants at the GDC have stood in a swivel chair, being able to spin around and to do a 180-degree turn. Likewise other VR games, Minecraft uses a snap-turning function, but many players get motion sickness when jumping the camera quickly.

Overall, the players loved how the huge mountains look in the virtual world and they felt like they were part of a magic landscape with deep valleys flowing with water. One of players remembered how Iron Golems were walking around and had a face-to-face moment with a creature. After this experience, that player started digging a hole in the ground, but he became claustrophobic when he had his body crammed into a small and dark pit. He didn’t like the low-resolution textures and when he was about to panic, he used the torches and calmed down.